Elizabeth Macklin


Sign Language

Where the great hands
spell out the A
to Z and a
scatter clearly
means scatter, a
pinkie held to
the heart then
an eye means
I see, the grammar
of which doesn't
matter: a non-
restrictive
relation's
conveyed by a
gesture; the face
is the only
true place for
expressions of
love, indecision,
rapture; two hands
brushing the
air past the ears
mean "You lost me,"
were over my head,
while love still
appears on the
heart (two crossed hands),
not in the head,
and practice
is one hand a plane
planing the back
of the other—
We do so nearly
believe we'll have
said what we needed
to say, with our
long training.


©2000, from You've Just Been Told.
Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company.





Master Classes



Written work


You've Just Been Told.
"Elizabeth Macklin ... contemplates the grammars of loss in her second collection of poems. Here an only child's responses to the faits accomplis of childhood—decisions already made, accidents of history and family, patterns preset—come to the adult mind in the presence of change and grief."

A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
"These are poems with ... a dark wit which yokes together diesel exhaust and desperate regret, and downright cityscapes with poignant longing. No dissociation of sensibility here."—Eavan Boland.

"Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?" (2001)
In Barrow Street's Fall 2001 Translation Issue, Macklin explores the Basque language, and the realm of "pre-translation"—where "it's hard to explain a misunderstanding when you don't understand, and especially when you don't know you don't understand."

"It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind" (2000)
"Perhaps a reader of By Herself will 'swerve' or 'veer' from thought to thought pleasurably, as ... Macklin recommends that women poets do, as writers, in her...opening essay..."—Molly McQuade, in her Introduction to By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry.



Selected Works

Meanwhile Take My Hand: Poems by Kirmen Uribe
A translation from the Basque, published by Graywolf Press
Poems
You've Just Been Told.
"These poems parse life's sentences.... [They are] poems of abrupt perception and rigorous lyricism." —New York Times Book Review.
A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
"[Her] city is surely the world, and the posture of kneeling surely implies reverence.." —Mary Oliver.
Several essays
"Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?" (2001)
A wander through Europe's oldest language, with a "found poem," called "What Does It Mean?"



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